I have a ring engraved with one of my favourite bumper sticker quotes: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” And while the odds are against my making history, which, after all, remembers only the few, I can at least aim to make waves.
This should excuse me from being a lady (that is, behaving in a ladylike manner). My mother did her best, but I was never born to be a good girl, let alone a lady.
I never really got the fairytales of my childhood. Yes, I’d have liked Cinderella’s ballgown (we had the Ladybird version, which has a 3-night royal ball, and three different gowns: pink, blue and finally silver-and-gold. I liked the blue one best, never the pink. Was this an early warning signal that I wasn't going to be a conventional good girl?).
Ballgowns are good, and to be the centre of attention was certainly attractive, but the lead-up to that? Domestic drudgery with good grace? You have got to be kidding me. I’m far too impatient, arrogant and subversive for that. In Cinderella’s place, I would have spat in the Ugly Sisters' soup and stirred Stepmother's tea with an unwashed toe. Or something along those lines.
Had I been Rapunzel, I would have cut my own plait off, and attached it to the bed sheets to escape rather than wait for some strange heavy man pull on my hair to climb up and rescue me. I always figured that would be incredibly painful for Rapunzel.
No wonder I preferred Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes versions. What he got so right in those stories was in letting the heroines save themselves. His Snow White doesn't need a prince – she and the dwarves only needed the mirror, with which to make a living gambling. Hardly ladylike, but certainly novel. His Cinderella doesn't go to the ball with her family, but is left home and has a tantrum – which is a far more realistic reaction to the situation. His Red Riding Hood shoots the wolf.
These girls are proactive and don't need a prince, a woodcutter or similar rescuer. They can use their wits to rescue themselves, to determine their own futures, to shape their own destinies.
More recently, Terry Pratchett created Tiffany Aching, teen witch on the Discworld, who (like many of his other female characters) is a formidable force in her own right.
None of these characters is the typical good girl, ladylike damsel of the fairytales, and all are better characters for it. Maybe they don't end up with Prince Charming, but is that really what we want to be telling girls in the 21st century? That their only purpose in life should be to marry a prince and be his wife? That they must behave like Cinderella, the uncomplaining, compliant drudge?
If we turn away from fairytales and look to facts, the women we remember, the women whose names survive the ages aren't simpering ladylike princesses. Helen of Troy ran off with her lover, leaving an enraged husband. Dido founded Carthage, using her wits to claim the biggest possible portion of land she could. Cleopatra was a master manipulator and politician – she had to be to rule a nation like Egypt. Boudicca rebelled against Roman arrogance, leading an army against the invading power. These women were far from well-behaved, by the standards of female behaviour of their days. Theirs are, I think, far better stories to tell our daughters and indeed, ourselves. After all, history remembers the remarkable few, the rebels who stand against the prevalent norms and so change the times they live in. And that's definitely a challenge for anyone to aspire to.
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